Tag: Robert E. Lee

Did the “Vietnam syndrome” affect how historians viewed the U.S. Civil War? Here’s an argument that it did.

But first, recognize that historians have mixed feelings about the present. On the one hand, today’s issues can shed light on the past because “each generation asks a different set of questions.”[1] On the other, they can lead to presentism—reshaping the past by imposing today’s viewpoints.

I’m always on the lookout for such interplays. And that may have happened with the post-Vietnam era.  I just learned that in 2002 the prominent Civil War historian Brian Holden Reid argued that the Vietnam War reshaped historians’ understanding of the American Civil War. [2] Reid’s article appeared in the journal of a British military-security think tank.

Of course, thousands of pages—thousands of books, perhaps—have been written trying to explain why the North won and the South lost. A major trope used to be that the North initially failed to win because it lacked bold generals willing to take their troops into battle—until Ulysses S. Grant was appointed commanding general.

A New Interpretation

Reid suggests that after the Vietnam War, Civil War history became more about why the South lost—by failing to take a more defensive strategy—and why, in historians’ view,  big battles were futile. Continue reading “What Does the Vietnam War Have to Do with the U.S. Civil War?”